I had felt like I needed a change of pace, not to rest or seek inspiration, but rather to untangle thoughts and answer questions.
A lot has happened for the second half of this year. I visited Beijing for the first time in almost 3 years. My grandma passed away when I was there. I decided last minute to search for an engineering job at a startup. I reneged on my Google APM offer the day before my start date. I moved to Hayes Valley in SF with friends. My originally lovely relationship started going downhill. The person I felt the most devoted to in my life broke up with me. I went on my first solo trip to Ecuador. And here we are, my last night before my return.
Mellow love songs vibe with the orange light at the little cafe nested in the narrow street. The rain started and stopped while I was aimlessly staring out of the window. I wish I could find a narrative for all the happenings that fits the arc of a heroine. I wish I could package everything with gift wrappers and put a nice bow tie on top. But nothing seemed to fit as if a set of chords tried to find its ending cadence but couldn’t quite get their harmonic catharsis. Suddenly, all the happenings in this half-year felt surreal.
Secret Garden in Cotopaxi, Ecuador is a surreal oasis away from reality. It is a hostel located at the end of a set of long, crooked, and narrow roads, away from cellular signals, the internet, and the hustling world. My phone became essentially useless, so I left it by my bedside and went about with my day without it. Putting it down felt like unloading a piece of baggage that I didn’t know burdened me.
For the first time in a very long time, I ate food without simultaneously scrolling through the infinite feeds of Instagram and Twitter. I stared out at the terrain a lot, sometimes with one of the house dogs on my lap napping, with absolutely nothing going through my mind. I am no longer doing one thing and remembering that I have forgotten to do another. I stopped getting distracted by the never-ending new notifications. I stopped stressing about when someone would get back to me or that one overdue email that I have yet to reply to. I didn’t need to worry about time because there was no schedule to adhere to and nothing to miss out on. Everything slowed down and calmed down to a state I had not experienced for a long, long time.
We hiked up to the glacier of Cotopaxi at 5000 meters altitude on Christmas Day. The air is so thin at such an altitude that every normal step seems extra consuming. We were in a single-file line hiking up for about 1.5 hours, and all I could focus on was breathing and moving my feet. I didn’t even have the spare energy to look around at the view or think about how far we had left to go. There was simply not enough oxygen to feel anxious about whether I would make it.
Am I happy with who I am without my labels? I have thought about this question a lot lately, and I never succeeded in navigating through the complex identities I hold to see who I am. That moment provided me with the most primitive answers. I was reduced to the simplest thing I could be — a breathing, moving being. I loved the pure being that I was, wholeheartedly, in the deepest and most all-accepting way.
The slowness and calmness of the lodge came with genuine inquisitiveness. I talked to people without subtly judging who they were, whether they were worthy of my attention, or if I needed to leave a certain impression. About 60 guests were staying there at a time, and everyone had a unique story:
George gained a cocaine and alcohol addiction, lost custody of his son, lost his job, and faced the fact that his mother had cancer all in one year. He turned his life around the year after, and then a new relationship brought back his addiction and ruined his life again. Now, he’s going on an around-the-world trip while doing the 75-hard challenge to find himself again.
The Montreal couple had met during the girl’s exchange from Denmark and decided to stay together. They’ve been traveling for a year now. Although they have no idea how her visa situation will work out once they need to move back to Canada, they have so much faith that they will find a way to be together.
Jason quit his well-paying job as a pharmacist to do his around-the-world trip because he “just can’t do it anymore.” He doesn’t know what he’s going to do next but doesn’t seem at all pressured to figure it out
Susie and Amit are on their honeymoon. They met in high school, and by next June they will have spent exactly half of their lives together. Yet, they seem to never run out of things to talk about.
The French lady has been teaching at French schools around the world for her entire life. She taught in El Salvador for the past 5 years and will be moving to a new country in another 2 years. She’s probably going to have to break up with her current boyfriend for the same reason as all her past boyfriends when she moves. I asked her if she would settle down for a long-term relationship and she said she’d rather teach around the world.
The old London guy sold everything he owned, left the city, and didn’t plan to come back. He says the only thing he misses is his friends. He gets a new tattoo for every new country he visits and will nomad forever until he finds a place or a person that he wants to call home.
No matter who you were, you were welcomed by everyone else here because we all needed friends while spending Christmas away from family. In SF, I constantly feel like I need to present as smart or ambitious to feel accepted. In college, I felt the pressure to be sharp to win the respect of boys in the same STEM classes and felt like I needed to be social to make friends. Everywhere else I’ve been, I always felt like I needed to be someone. Here, I didn’t need to be anyone to be enough. We’d invite each other to join our games. We’d ask questions about each other’s country. We’d exchange travel tips. Barely any questions that identify your profession or status in any sense were asked, and no answer was cooler than the other.
This is more freeing than I could have ever imagined. Many groups I am lucky to be affiliated with select people based on one or more of the competency-based criteria. So often, we hear things like “you are here because we believe you are special,” or “everyone we invited is extremely talented.” I lately realized that I might not be as ambitious as I thought I was. Being an early employee at a startup, I realized I probably wouldn’t want to sacrifice my personal life for years to work on a venture-scale startup. After started earning real money, I realized I didn’t care about accumulating wealth remotely as much as my peers. All I need is to have something interesting to think about, whether that means solving a difficult ML research problem or going on a special journey of self-discovery. I wonder how many people would still have the same relationship with me if I decided today that I am going to spend the next year on work-aways across the world and potentially never come back again to tech.
I realized how important traveling is to me, and how accessible it is for anyone to backpack. “When I make it, I will travel the world” is such bullshit. Traveling requires more of an open heart and an adventurous spirit than a puffy wallet. Anyone can travel at any time, as long as they truly desire it.
I’d like to have kids when I am 30ish, which means I have 7 years to travel the world. That amounts to 14 vacations, probably 20 countries — but there’s so much in the world that I want to see! It made me realize that, between jobs, I will probably want to do a multi-month-long solo trip (friends can join here and there) where I explore the magnificent corners of the earth. I’ve got no direction for my life beyond a 1 year horizon but this is the one thing that I know matters to me and I know I will make it happen. There are no dependencies that can stop me anymore — not the lack of a travel buddy, funds, or a courageous, curious heart. For this part of my life, I feel invincible.
Last thing: family.
My end-of-year blues start every late November when Christmas music soaks the evening air and red and golden decors light up the streets. The warmth and fuzziness of it all never fails to remind me of what I am missing.
I realized I would never have a family dinner until I had a family of my own.
It had been true for a long time but my sense of independence had always managed to put a bandit over it. I was proud to have moved into college and my new place in the city all on my own. It was cool not to go home but to travel with friends every holiday season. I was pretending to myself that I still had a home in Beijing, and I was just far away from it, but when I went back this summer I realized that was merely a thought of comfort.
My room was long ago reserved by a relative so I stayed in a hotel room for 3 weeks while I was there. With my grandma passing away, my dad who works in another city no longer has any reason to visit our place in Beijing. I threw out most of my stuff to make some more space for the cluttered, old apartment. My grandpa can no longer comprehend a simple sentence. My grandma and I speak the same language but understand nothing about each other’s lives after the 7 years that I have been gone. My old friends from middle school had lived a whole life in between now when I saw them last time. In every sense, I felt like a visitor to the place that raised me.
When I grew up, we used to do family dinners on Chinese New Year with grandparents from both sides and occasionally relatives from out of town. It never felt like a big deal until now that I have lost it forever. With my parents divorced, me not having siblings, my grandparents getting old and passing away, and everyone living in different parts of the world, I will never have another family dinner. I am so, so grateful for all my lovely friends, but nothing can fill that void.
There’s a subtle yet unbearable sense of sadness to this. Something so primal and fundamental would be absent until I manage to build it for myself again, over the next decade, with the one that I choose to love. Talking about doing hard things, this is perhaps one of the hardest things to be done, with patience, luck, occasional heartbreaks, and lots of hard work.
I am grateful for all my friends, everyone who’s been following my writing, and everyone who read this far. Thank you all ❤️